Notes From a Small Island (6 page)

who would mostly despise him as an unkempt hippie, would certainly never let him into their own union, and who had enjoyed decades  of obscenely inflated  earnings without once showing collective support for any other union, including, on occasion, provincial branches of their own NGA. Simultaneously it occurred to me that I was about to squander my small life for the benefit of a man who had, without apparent hesitation, given up his own nationality out of economic self-interest, who didn't know who I was, would as lightly have discarded me if a machine could be found to do my job, and whose idea of maximum magnanimity was to hand out a six-ounce can of beer and a limp sandwich. I could imagine the company writing to my wife: 'Dear Mrs Bryson: In appreciation of your husband's recent tragic death at the hands of a terrifying mob, we would like you to have this sandwich and can of lager. PS - Could you please return his parking pass?'

And all the time this was going on, while a large wild man with dreadlocks was trying to wrench open my door with a view to carrying me off wriggling into the darkness, some halfwit from the foreign desk fifty yards ahead was walking slowly around his Peugeot, assessing it deliberatively like someone about to buy a second-hand car, and occasionally pausing to look with puzzlement at the bricks and blows raining down on the cars behind him, as if it were some kind of freak weather occurrence. Eventually, he got back in his car, checked the rearview mirror, made sure his newspaper was still on the seat beside him, put on his indicator, checked the mirror again and pulled off, and my life was saved.

Four days later, the company stopped bringing round free sandwiches and beer.

It was thus very refreshing to walk without fear for my life through the dozing streets of Wapping. I have never bought into that quaint conceit about London being essentially a cluster of villages - where else have you seen villages with flyovers, gasometers, reeling derelicts and a view of the Post Office Tower? - but to my delight and surprise Wapping did, in fact, rather feel like one. Its shops were small and varied and the streets had cozy names: Cinnamon Street, Waterman Way, Vinegar Street, Milk Yard. The council estates were snug and cheery looking, and the looming warehouses had almost all been smartly renovated as flats. I instinctively quivered at the sight of yet more glossy red trim and the thought of these once-proud workplaces filled with braying twits named Selena and Jasper, but it must be said that they have

t^learly brought some prosperity to the neighbourhood and doubt-| fess saved the old warehouses from far sadder fates.

Near Wapping Old Stairs, I had a look at the river and tried to ^imagine, without the tiniest measure of success, what these old neighbourhoods must have looked like in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when they teemed with workers and the wharves P were piled high with barrels of the spices and condiments that gave ; the surrounding streets their names. As recently as 1960, over ? 100,000 people worked on the docks or drew their livings from it, I', and Docklands was still one of the busiest ports in the world. By 1981, every London dock was closed. The view of the river from Wapping now was as tranquil and undisturbed as a Constable land-- scape. I watched the river for perhaps thirty minutes and saw just one boat go by. Then I turned and began the long trek back to Hazlitt's.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   FOUR

I SPENT A COUPLE MORE DAYS IN LONDON DOING NOTHING MUCH. I DID

a little research in a newspaper library, spent most of one afternoon trying to find my way through the complex network of pedestrian subways at Marble Arch, did a little shopping, saw some friends.

Everyone I saw said, 'Gosh, you're brave!' when I revealed that I was planning to travel around Britain by public transport, but it never occurred to me to go any other way. You are so lucky in this country to have a relatively good public transport system (relative, that is, to what it will be when the Tories finish with it) and I think we should all try harder to enjoy.it while it's still there. Besides, driving in Britain is such a dreary experience these days. There are far too many cars on the road, nearly double what there were when I first came here, and in those days people didn't actually drive their cars. They just parked them in the driveway and buffed them up once every week or so. About twice a year they would 'get the car out' - those were the words they used, like that in itself was a big operation - and pootle off to visit relatives in East Grinstead or have a trip to some place like Hayling Island or Eastbourne, and that was about it, apart from the buffing.

Now everyone drives everywhere for everything, which I don't understand because there isn't a single feature of driving in Britain that has even the tiniest measure of enjoyment in it. Just consider the average multi-storey car park. You drive around for ages, and then spend a small eternity shunting into a space that is exactly two inches wider than the average car. Then, because you are parked next to a pillar, you have to climb over the seats and end up

squeezing butt-first out of the passenger door, in the process transferring all the dirt from the side of your car to the back of your smart new jacket from Marks & Spencer. Then you go hunting for some distant pay-and-display machine, which doesn't make change or accept any coin introduced since 1976, and wait on an old guy who likes to read all the instructions on the machine before committing himself and then tries to insert his money through the ticket slot and maintenance keyhole.

Eventually you acquire a ticket and trek back to your car where your wife greets you with a 'Where have you been?' Ignoring her, you squeeze past the pillar, collecting a matching set of dust for the front of your jacket, discover that you can't reach the windscreen as the door only opens three inches, so you just sort of throw the ticket at the dashboard (it flutters to the floor but your wife doesn't notice so you say, 'Fuck it,' and lock the door), and squeeze back out where your wife sees what a scruff you've turned into after she spent all that time dressing you and beats the dust from you with paddled hands while saying, 'Honestly, I can't take you anywhere.'

And that's just the beginning. Arguing quietly, you have to find your way out of this dank hellhole via an unmarked door leading to a curious chamber that seems to be a composite of dungeon and urinal, or else wait two hours for the world's most abused and unreliable-looking lift, which will only take two people and already has two people in it - a man whose wife is beating dust from his new Marks & Spencer jacket and berating him in clucking tones.

And the remarkable thing is that everything about this process is intentionally - mark this, intentionally - designed to flood your life with unhappiness. From the tiny parking bays that can only be got into by manoeuvring your car through a forty-six-point turn (why can't the spaces be angled, for crying out loud?) to the careful placing of pillars where they will cause maximum obstruction, to the ramps that are so dark and narrow and badly angled that you always bump the kerb, to the remote, wilfully unhelpful ticket machines (you can't tell me that a machine that can recognize and reject any foreign coin ever produced couldn't make change if it wanted to) - all of this is designed to make this the most dispiriting experience of your adult life. Did you know - this is a little-known fact but absolute truth - that when they dedicate a new multi-storey car park the Lord Mayor and his wife have a ceremonial pee in the stairwell? It's true.

And that's just one tiny part of the driving experience. There areall the other manifold annoyances of motoring, like National Express drivers who pull out in front of you on motorways, eight-mile-long contraflow systems erected so that some guys on a crane can change a lightbulb, traffic lights on busy roundabouts that never let you advance more than twenty feet at a time, motorway service areas where you have to pay £4.20 for a minipot of coffee and a jacket potato with a sneeze of cheddar in it and there's no point in going to the shop because the men's magazines are all sealed in plastic and you don't need any Waylon Jennings Highway Hits tapes, morons with caravans who pull out of side-roads just as you approach, some guy in a Morris Minor going 11 mph through the Lake District and collecting a three-mile following because, apparently, he's always wanted to lead a parade, and other challenges to your patience and sanity nearly beyond endurance. Motorized vehicles are ugly and dirty and they bring out the worst in people. They clutter every kerbside, turn ancient market squares into disorderly jumbles of metal, spawn petrol stations, secondhand car lots, Kwik-Fit centres and other dispiriting blights. They are horrible and awful and I wanted nothing to do with them on this trip. And besides, my wife wouldn't let me have the car.

Thus it was that I found myself late on a grey Saturday afternoon, on an exceptionally long and empty train bound for Windsor. I sat high on the seat in an empty carriage, and in fading daylight watched as the train slid past office blocks and out into the forests of council flats and snaking terrace houses of Vauxhall and Clapham. At Twickenham, I discovered why the train was so long and so empty. The platform was jammed solid with men and boys in warm clothes and scarves carrying glossy programmes and little bags with tea flasks peeping out: obviously a rugby crowd from the Twickenham grounds. They boarded with patience and without pushing, and said sorry when they bumped . or inadvertently impinged on someone else's space. I admired this instinctive consideration for others, and was struck by what a regular thing that is in Britain and how little it is noticed. Nearly everyone rode all the way to Windsor - I presume there must be some sort of parking arrangement there; Windsor can't provide that many rugby fans -and formed a patient crush at the ticket barrier. An Asian man collected tickets in fast motion and said thank you to every person who passed. He didn't have time to examine the tickets - you could have handed him a cornflakes boxtop - but he did manage to find a vigorous salute for all, and they in turn thanked him for relieving them of their tickets and letting them pass. It was a little miracle of orderliness and goodwill. Anywhere else there'd have been some-one on a box barking at people to form a line and not push.

The streets of Windsor were shiny with rain and unseasonally dark and wintry, but they were still filled with throngs of tourists. I got a room in the Castle Hotel on the High Street, one of those peculiarly higgledy-piggledy hotels in which you have to embark on

an epic trek through a succession of wandering corridors and fire-doors. I had to go up one flight of stairs and, some distance further ON, down another in order to reach the distant wing of which my room was the very last. But it was a nice room and, I presumed,

handy for Reading if I decided to exit through the window.

I dumped my pack and hastened back the way I came, keen to see a little of Windsor before the shops shut. I knew Windsor well because we used to shop there when we lived in Virginia Water down the road, and I strode with a proprietorial air, noting which shops had altered or changed hands over the years, which is to say most of them. Beside the handsome town hall stood Market Cross House, a building so perilously leaning that you can't help wonder if it was built that way to attract Japanese visitors with cameras. It was now a sandwich bar, but, like most of the other shops on the pretty jumble of cobbled streets around it, it has been about a million things, usually tourist-connected. The last time I was here most of them were selling egg-cups with legs; now they seemed to specialize in twee little cottages and castles. Only Woods of Windsor, a company that manages to get more commercial mileage out of lavender than I would ever have thought possible, is still there selling soaps and toilet water. On Peascod Street, Marks & Spencer had expanded, Hammick's and Laura Ashley had moved locations, and the Golden Egg and Wimpy were, not surprisingly, long gone (though I confess a certain fondness for the old-style Wimpys with their odd sense of what constituted American food, as if they had compiled their recipes from a garbled telex). But I was pleased to note that Daniel's, the most interesting department store in Britain, was still there.

Daniel's is the most extraordinary place. It has all the features you expect of a provincial department store - low ceilings, tiny obscure departments, frayed carpets held down with strips of electrician's tape, a sense that this space was once occupied by about eleven different shops and dwellings all with slightly differentelevations - but it has the oddest assortment of things on sale: knicker elastic and collar snaps, buttons and pinking shears, six pieces of Portmeirion china, racks of clothing for very old people, a modest few rolls of carpet with the sort of patterns you get when you rub your eyes too hard, chests of drawers with a handle missing, wardrobes on which one of the doors quietly swings open fifteen seconds after you experimentally shut it. Daniel's always puts me in mind of what Britain might have been like under Communism.

It has long seemed to me unfortunate - and I'm taking the global view here - that such an important experiment in social organization was left to the Russians when the British would have managed it so much better. All those things that are necessary to the successful implementation of a rigorous socialist system are, after all, second nature to the British. For a start, they like going without. They are great at pulling together, particularly in the face of adversity, for a perceived common good. They will queue patiently for indefinite periods and accept with rare fortitude the imposition of rationing, bland diets and sudden inconvenient shortages of staple goods, as anyone who has ever looked for bread at a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon will know. They are comfortable with faceless bureaucracies and, as Mrs Thatcher proved, tolerant of dictatorships. They will wait uncomplainingly for years for an operation or the delivery of a household appliance. They have a natural gift for making excellent jokes about authority without seriously challenging it, and they derive universal satisfaction from the sight of the rich and powerful brought low. Most of those above the age of twenty-five already dress like East Germans. The conditions, in a word, are right.

Please understand I'm not saying that Britain would have been a happier, better place under Communism, merely that the British would have done it properly. They would have taken it in their stride, with good heart, and without excessive cheating. In point of fact, until about 1970 it wouldn't have made the slightest discernible difference to most people's lives, and might at least have spared us Robert Maxwell.

I rose early the next day and attended to my morning hygiene in a state of small excitation because I had a big day ahead of me. I was going to walk across Windsor Great Park. It is the most splendid park I know. It stretches over forty enchanted square miles and

Incorporates into its ancient fabric every manner of sylvan charm: deep primeval woodlands, bosky dells, wandering footpaths and bridleways, formal and informal gardens and a long, deeply fetch-ing lake.  Scattered picturesquely  about  are  farms,  woodland images, forgotten statues, a whole village occupied by estate workers and things that the Queen has brought back from trips abroad and couldn't think of anywhere else to put - obelisks and totem poles and other curious expressions of gratitude from distant outposts of the Commonwealth.

"The news had not yet come out that there was oil under the park and that it all soon might turn into a new Sullom Voe (but don't be Inarmed; the local authority will make them screen the derricks

with shrubs), so I didn't realize that I ought to drink things in care-

fully in case the next time I came this way it looked like an Oklahoma oilfield. At this time, Windsor Great Park continued to  enjoy a merciful obscurity, which I find mystifying in an open space so. glorious on the very edge of London. Only once could I remem-ber any reference to the park in the newspapers, a couple of years before when Prince Philip had taken a curious disliking to an avenue of ancient trees and had instructed Her Majesty's Tree-Choppers to remove them from the landscape. I expect their branches had imperilled the progress through the

park of his horses and plus-four, or whatever it is you call those creaking contraptions he so likes to roam around in. You often see him and other members of the royal family in the park, speeding past in assorted vehicles on their way to polo matches or church services in the Queen Mother's private compound, the Royal lodge. Indeed, because the public aren't allowed to drive on the park roads, a significant portion of the little traffic that passes is generated by royals. Once, on Boxing Day when I was ambling along in a paternal fashion beside an offspring on a shiny new tricycle, I became aware with a kind of sixth sense that we were holding up the progress of a car and turned to find that it was being driven by Princess Diana. As I hastened myself and my child out of the way, she gave me a smile that melted my heart, and since that time I have never said a word against the dear sweet girl, however pressed by those who think that she is a bit off her head because she spends £28,000 a year on leotards and makes occasional crank phone calls to hunky military men. (And who among us hasn't? is my unanswerable reply.)